Pagina's

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Finland in my ears

Hello from snowstormy yet sunny Kaunas! The weather has been acting a little crazy here lately but unfortunately I didn't manage to spot a 'snowbow' instead of a rainbow yet. Would be interesting to see how that would look like though. My days are filled with thesis writing and I currently reached the phase in which the quantity is ok (50 pages in around one month, not too bad), but that the quality is very much in need of some detailed shaping. My topic concerns female media and sexual objectification and I must admit I slowly start to understand why men are so puzzled by female behavior. In order to clear my mind from this often contradictory topic I please my ears with some (this is a coincident) Finnish delights. I'd like to share two instrumental masterpieces with you which I consider to be worth listening to.

This first piece is some classical music by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. 'Intermezzo' is part of the Karelia Suite (1893) and I don't know about you, but when playing it out very loud I so feel it. In my eyes all the similar sounding pop songs nowadays cannot top something as powerful as this. The Karelia Suite comes forth from Sibelius' love for the in that time Finnish region Karelia with its many beautiful lakes and forests. Having experienced Finland myself several times, I can understand Sibelius' connection between his musical expression and Karelia's breathtaking nature. The optimistic nature of Intermezzo always touches such a happy note, yet, ending moderately, like Finnish enthusiasm. I'm personally very interested in how Russia eventually got hold of Karelia with the consequence Finland had to give up its biggest part of that region. If you coincidently have any literature or stories about this topic, please let me know! Google street view led me though some almost abandoned places which used to be happy Finnish towns with a lot of flourishing employment possibilities, but which are now covered with cheap looking Russian shop signs. I definitely want to explore this rather untypical destination once, but only armed with mosquito spray. What if Russia would just give back Karelia to Finland in exchange for Crimea ;-)?

The second song which I love to listen over and over again is the instrumental version of Nightwishes Song of Myself. I noticed that I like the songs from this Finnish band better when being just instrumental, without singing. This could easily be a track of one of my adventurous ballooning movies actually. Nightwish can be categorized as playing symphonic heavy metal, and especially this symphonic touch attracts me a lot. Always when I listen to Nightwish I think back of some awesome ballooning fun in France during the 2011 edition of Mondial Air Ballons. I used two of Nightwishes tracks for the short movie I made about my flights there.